CREDIT: NICKELBACK
Nickelback hater or not, even this reviewer had to give No Fixed Address two out of five stars. It's pretty bad.

Nickelback is the band that all your friends love to hate, and if the band is on your iPod, you probably aren’t bragging about it.

These Canadian rockers take a lot of flack from the public but they don’t show any signs of slowing down. Those of you who share in this guilty pleasure will be delighted to hear that Nickelback’s latest album No Fixed Address came out on November 17.

One of the biggest insults to Nickelback is that every song sounds exactly the same. It’s a heavy blow for a band, but it’s a pretty accurate remark. For better or worse, the band has buckled under the constant heckles and given us something that’s a little different. While some of these songs stay true to the original Nickelback recipe, quite a few of them could be played on the radio without being pinned as a Nickelback song. This departure from normal conventions could, and probably will, blow up in the guys’ faces.

As a whole, the album is considerably less edgy than past releases. The guitars are less of a focal point and have traded out their classic crunchy tone in favour of a smoother quality that sounds smaller and is almost psychedelic at times. In addition to losing some edge, the album has a more pronounced pop influence than previous records.

Many of the songs feature vocal effects on Chad Kroeger’s singing in an effort to mask the trademark sound that causes so many people to claim Nickelback songs are all the same. This alteration is bearable and actually provides a refreshing experience, but it’s the only tolerable production change on the album. In song three, “What Are You Waiting For?” synthesizers come to play a key role, and this is where things start to stray from true Nickelback. “What Are You Waiting For?” sounds like it should have been on a pop album by Katy Perry, not sung by an infamous rock band. Other lowlights are “Satellite” and “Miss You,” each being electronically influenced, with acoustic guitars and an unsettling amount of country twang. It is disturbing how country Nickelback sounds when you take away the big electric guitars.

If you can manage to persevere through this pop perversion of Nickelback, you’ll be greeted with a special treat in the second last song, “Got Me Runnin’ Round.” The track opens with a hip-hop styled drum beat, is followed by guitars emulating DJ scratching and, if you can get past the most cliché lyrics on the album, you’ll notice the superfluous use of horns in the chorus. The musical slander doesn’t stop here though. After a bout of soulful female singing, there’s a rap verse sung by Flo Rida. If you’re unfamiliar with this artist, he is the rapper behind “Low” and “Whistle.”

No Fixed Address starts out strong and is true to the original style of music that helped Nickelback to shoot to the top. However, after “Edge Of A Revolution,” the second song on the album, the quality drops and gets progressively weaker, until you’re in disbelief that it is still Nickelback. If it weren’t for Chad Kroeger’s telltale vocals, you would think you were listening to an entirely different band.

This album gets two out of five stars not because of trendy Nickelback hating, but because it is a genuinely poor production that isn’t true to the band’s past. If you want to listen to real Nickelback, put this album down and go buy a copy of Silver Side Up instead.

Rating: 2 out of 5